Article Tags: Headline Story, Met Office, Piers Corbyn, UK Winter Forecast 2009/10, Updated
Never mind the failed putsch against Gordon Brown and England’s Test match heroics, the matter of the moment is the white stuff. We haven’t had snow all over the country like this for decades. What’s changed and why?
The first part — what’s changed — is relatively straightforward: a freezing draught has started coming in through the UK’s door from the North Pole and Siberia.
As Robin Thwaites of the Met Office describes it: “We have a large area of high pressure sitting over Greenland and Iceland and that is a block of cold air. Cold air is very dense and doesn’t like to budge very quickly, so that is acting as a barrier to the normal westerly flow of [milder] weather that we get off the Atlantic.”
The block has forced our typical weather south: our rain has instead been falling in Spain, which is having an unusually wet winter. “They’ve had the rain and instead we’ve had winds either from the Arctic or from Siberia via Scandinavia,” said Thwaites.
Updated below with comments by Piers Corbyn
Source: timesonline.co.uk